The following video describes how to claim disability living allowance rates.

[youtube_sc url=http://youtu.be/wc-tS–TXbA]

Transcription:

“Hello, my name is Lee Healy and I’m the Managing Director of Income Max, the retirement experts. We help people to make sense of and understand the benefits and tax credit system.

Today, we’re going to tell you lots about the benefits and tax credits that are available.

Disability living allowance is a disability benefit for people under 65 when they first claim. Now, disability living allowance is broken down into two components, care and mobility. Each component is broken down into rates. First of all, the care component. The care component has three rates, low, middle, and high. The mobility component has two rates, low and high.

First of all, the care component. Now as we said, the care component has three rates, low, middle, and high. The low rate, you’d normally qualify for the low rate if you need some kind of help with cooking a main meal or preparing a main meal, or alternatively, if you’ve got a kind of health problems and disabilities that affect you and you need a kind of small amount of help with that each day, so that might be things like getting out of bed, getting dressed, and so on and so forth.

For the middle rate of the care component, they’re basically looking to see whether you need help with your personal care. Now, this includes things like washing and bathing, getting in and out of the bath, getting dressed. It can also look at whether you need supervision to avoid danger, so that’s things like falls, seizures, those kind of things. For the middle rate, the government will be looking at whether you need help during the day or during the night. Now, the high rate has similar rules to the middle rate, apart from its looking to see whether you actually need this kind of help both during the day and during the night. So basically just to summarize, the care component is broken down into low, middle, and high rates.

Now the mobility component is slightly different. For the mobility, it has low and high rates, so two rates. The low rate component is basically looking to see whether you need guidance and supervision when outdoors. Now, this kind of applies to people with perhaps, if you’ve got visual impairment, perhaps you’ve got hearing impairment, perhaps you have seizures or falls. So it’s actually looking at the help you need and the support you need when outdoors from another person.

The high rate mobility component is a little bit different. It’s more concentrated on kind of physical walking problems. So, for example, perhaps you’re completely unable to walk, perhaps you’re what’s called virtually unable to walk, which is where they’re kind of looking at how far you can walk, the distance you can walk, and how you actually walk and whether you feel pain and discomfort. Also, if you obviously have, perhaps you’re an amputee or were born without legs, that’s a qualifying criteria for the high rate.

There’s also a special rule for the high rate mobility, looking at basically what they call severe mental impairment. With that particular category, they’re also going to be looking to see whether you’ve got the high rate of the care component as well.

So just to summarize on the mobility, we’ve got two rates, that’s the low rate and the high rate mobility.

It’s worth mentioning that for children, the mobility component has some restrictions. So, for example, children under five are basically unable to claim the low rate mobility, and children under three are unable to claim the high rate mobility.

For information on all disability living allowance rates, it’s worth visiting the disability alliance website. You can visit that at www.DisabilityAlliance.org.